


Te deum

by fraisemilk



Category: Gangsta. (Manga)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-10
Updated: 2015-09-10
Packaged: 2018-04-20 03:15:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4771412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraisemilk/pseuds/fraisemilk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A vague memory: reeking, two flowers, and the heart that beats under your skin, and the pallor of a cheek, and the smile of your master.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Te deum

I.

Were you born in a cemetery, or in a half-burning field? The memory of it is fuzzy – a dream, if it were not for the traces your birth made permanent in your flesh. A reverie, if it were not for a ghostly presence.

For there is, constant, fleeting, the discarnate impression of someone intensely looking at you. Your body just a mirror, just the reflection on the glass pane of a window; something different than yourself. It dwells on you, the stare, the gaze, and there is no margin to keep it away. You say nothing of it. You say nothing about it. You bear on your shoulders the numinous eyes, and you stay quiet when the fear of it shifts from ill curiosity to wretched dread when you find yourself alone in the dark.

You wake up feverish; you close your eyes, casting the ache away – you stand up unsteadily. The sun is not up yet. This is the moment of the day when the stare is the most insistent. When you close your eyes, unused to the brightness of the rising sun, in the beating of your heart against the skin of your chest and the damp coldness of morning dew that makes you shiver, there is, unrelenting, the eyes, the feeling of being both close and distant to someone –

 

II.

Sliding your left hand on the junction of your right shoulder and you neck, you try not to think of the cold. Tight tendon, beating heart, the blood fleeing right there from the artery of your neck to the clock in your chest.  Bringing the shivers to a stop is impossible; the cold slides straight through your veins to the circuits of your brain. The sun is bright, and your neck feels hot. You burn. You are cold. You see, distant, the wings of a crow flutter. The shivers will not stop –

You beg your body to obey, and for a moment it stays upright, in a lopsided way. You are a small wooden puppet.

(The child sets himself upright once again. The child has to obey to the men.)

 

III.

There is delicate agony painted on a quivering profile, there is the skin tightening across twisted features, and there are pale shoulders hunching, bending under an invisible force; there is the blood curling on a woman’s chin, on a woman’s breath, on a woman’s heart – now and then, the woman is dead, you see it, you can remember. Yet, wasn’t there a _before then_? Recall it with all your strength – wasn’t there a _quiet_ yesterday?

 

IV.

A breath is a mountain. On your best days, you can remember the ghost and its agony without quivering under its angry stare. On the other days, curling in your nose, the rotten smell of death. 

There is a mountain to climb for each breath. You are the dross washed away by the waves; you try to hide, feral, in the small loophole left in the holes of the streets. Yet, in this freedom that is afraid, there is still the sense of being fettered to the ground, to the gutter, to the Fetid.

You are afraid. You are afraid. You are afraid. You try to hide in the smoke of a tired visage.

(The things you are afraid of are few: the pain, the ghost –)

(The woman, then and now.)

(The things you are afraid of are few, but you fear greatly.)

There is no anxiety when the blows smear your skin with blue; there is no anguish when the boy cries and when the boy’s mouth opens widely – _kill, Nicolas, idiot, father, please_ ; there is only, residual, a certainty.

Reeking, the guts of a man and two small flowers twisting their thin figure between two blocks of brick in the street. Reeking, the familiar stench of a dead body; the stench of a woman, the woman, the stench of your mother floating in the grey alley, in the shadows of men.

The boy smiles at you; you want to smile back. A certainty holds you back.

 

V.

You cannot remember happy days. Days in which, tenderly, a woman took you in her arms, balanced your small body on her lap. Yet you remember this moment, the instant mistake, inhaling the scent of her death – each morning you wake up and the fever reminds you of the twists of her mouth and the pallor of her cheeks. Proof; here in your veins hides the certainty.

 

VI.

You write “Nicolas Brown” on a white sheet of paper. It crumples. You close your eyes.

You close your eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments are lovely! 
> 
> (tumblr: da-da-daaa)


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